The Immune System Recovery Plan: A Doctor's 4-Step Program to Treat Autoimmune Disease - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Susan Blum, MD, MPH, is the founder of the Blum Center for Health in Rye Brook, New York, an advisor to the Institute for Functional Medicine, and serves on the Medical Advisory Board for The Dr. Oz Show. An assistant clinical professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, she has been treating and preventing chronic disease for more than a decade. She lives in Armonk, New York, with her husband and three sons.

Michele Bender is an award-winning freelance writer who has coauthored bestselling books such as Believe Me with Yolanda Hadid, The Immune System Recovery Plan with Dr. Susan Blum and Curly Girl: The Handbook. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, Real Simple, and Family Circle, among other national publications.
 

Mark Hyman, MD, is the editor in chief of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, the most prestigious journal in the field of integrative medicine. After ten years as co-medical director at Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires, he is now in private practice in Lenox, Massachusetts. He is the author of numerous books, including Young Forever, The Pegan Diet, and Food Fix, and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Ultraprevention. Visit his website DrHyman.com.

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The Immune System Recovery Plan

INTRODUCTION

Getting Started: A New Partnership

There’s a growing epidemic in our country. It doesn’t grab newspaper headlines or make the evening news, but it’s there and it is debilitating and potentially deadly. It is the epidemic of autoimmune disease. Autoimmune diseases are among the most prevalent forms of chronic illness in this country, now affecting an estimated 23.5 million Americans. More people suffer from this group of chronic illnesses than from cancer or heart disease, yet most people don’t even know what these conditions are. This lack of awareness is killing us—literally. It’s causing severe pain, disability, and even death. Worse yet, many people with autoimmune conditions suffer with their symptoms because conventional doctors either can’t figure out what’s wrong or can’t get to the root of the problem.

The answer is functional medicine, a medical specialty that has come of age in the past ten years and focuses on reversing these chronic conditions. Hope is here. You’re holding it in your hands.

WHY A BOOK ON AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE?

There are more than one hundred different autoimmune conditions, and they are all serious chronic diseases caused by an underlying problem in the immune system. This book is a call to alarm: these diseases are reversible and curable if caught early, before they progress and cause severe pain, disability, and even death. The first symptoms might be vague feelings of fatigue, muscle or joint pain, or a nagging feeling that something isn’t right. With simple blood tests, you can be diagnosed at this early stage, and then, by following the steps in this book, your immune system can be brought back into balance before irreversible damage is done to your brain, joints, thyroid, blood vessels, and other vital organs. If you have been suffering from an autoimmune condition for some time and you have already experienced some tissue damage, this book will help you feel better in general, show how you can actually reverse the effects of the disease, and help prevent your specific tissue damage from getting worse. As a doctor, I have long been aware of autoimmune conditions such as Graves’ disease, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, lupus, multiple sclerosis (MS), Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, psoriasis, alopecia areata, vitiligo, Sjögren’s syndrome, and scleroderma, among others. But when I was diagnosed with one of these illnesses, it changed both my personal and professional lives forever.

MY STORY

Before I go any further, let me introduce myself the way I would if you were one of the patients in my office. I’m Dr. Susan Blum, a board-certified physician in preventive medicine and an assistant clinical professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. I am also the founder of Blum Center for Health in Rye Brook, New York.

In medical school, I started down the road of traditional medicine. Then during my internal medicine residency, I quickly realized that I didn’t want to focus just on illness or disease; I wanted to focus on preventing those conditions in the first place. But back then preventive medicine consisted mostly of screening tests and public health programs. It wasn’t part of a doctor’s everyday practice. Physicians just weren’t given the tools in medical school to help their patients change their behavior, such as how to get people to eat healthfully or reduce stress. I knew I had to take a different route as a doctor, so I sought training from institutions that were considered “outside the box” at the time. In particular, I was interested in the relationship between stress, nutrition, and illness.

I moved off the beaten path of traditional medicine toward a more holistic approach and into an emerging field called functional medicine. First I completed a program at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C., where I learned tools for stress management and methods to reverse the effects of stress on the body. Then, at the Institute for Functional Medicine, I learned how food affects these processes, either promoting health or causing diseases. When I started applying what I had learned about stress management and nutrition in my own practice, I saw firsthand how these methods helped people to prevent and actually reverse chronic diseases. These two ideas—prevention and reversal of chronic disease—became my passions and are at the core of my medical practice today. But there is one area where these techniques are truly life-changing: autoimmune diseases.

I know this not only because I have seen the benefits for my patients who suffer from autoimmune diseases but also because I saw the impact on myself when I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.

I discovered it more than a decade ago when a friend asked me why my hands were so yellow. I actually hadn’t noticed this before, but she was right, so I immediately had blood work done to find out why.

“You have hypothyroidism,” my doctor told me after the lab results came back. Me? A thyroid problem? I couldn’t believe it. Hypothyroidism is a condition in which the thyroid gland doesn’t produce enough thyroid hormone. This hormone is necessary to help the body convert beta-carotene, a nutrient found in yellow and orange fruits and vegetables, into vitamin A. Because this conversion wasn’t happening, all the beta-carotene from my healthful diet wasn’t being properly processed. Instead, these nutrients were building up in my body, and one symptom of this was my yellow hands. In retrospect, I realized that this wasn’t the only one. Another was the fact that I had to work really hard to keep from gaining weight, and a third was that I was often very tired. But at the time I didn’t realize these were signs of a problem. They had been part of my life for so long that I considered them “normal.”

Further testing revealed even more bad news. I had an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. In other words, my immune system, which is normally the body’s defense in the daily battle against infection and invaders, was no longer protecting or defending me. In fact, my immune cells had turned against my thyroid, attacking it and damaging it to the point where it was struggling unsuccessfully to make enough thyroid hormone. I was shocked. I had become a vegetarian years earlier, I exercised regularly, I practiced yoga and meditation, and I had cultivated a strong, spiritual faith. I had faced my demons in psychotherapy and was finally content with my life. Because I was doing what I thought were all the right things already, being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease was shocking and frightening. I was also a medical doctor, so I just couldn’t believe that something was going on inside my body that I didn’t know about.

But my primary care physician just shrugged off this upsetting news. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “You’ll just take thyroid hormone replacement medication and be fine.” No big deal? Maybe not to him, but my intuition told me something wasn’t right. My body was out of balance, and I wanted answers. Why did I have this disease? And why now? To understand my illness, I decided to use it as an opportunity to explore all that traditional and nontraditional medicine had to offer me. I didn’t want to take a pill that would only mask the problem and just manage...